Speaker Biographies – New York, Fall 2022

Bishop Brock, Head of Research, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Bishop ensures that STAC’s research, benchmark standards, and software tools meet the needs of STAC’s community. He has over 30 years of experience, including research roles at State Street, IBM Research, and Computational Logic, Inc. in diverse areas including machine learning, automated reasoning, formal verification, embedded systems, and computer energy management. Before joining STAC, he contributed to new STAC benchmarks and developed STAC Benchmark implementations on multiple platforms. Bishop is an IBM Master Inventor, Senior Member of the IEEE, has passed the CFA Exam Level III, and holds a BS in Chemistry and BA and MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Bhushan Chitlur, Senior Principal Engineer, Datacenter and AI group, Intel Corporation.
Bhushan is focused on next generation of datacenter accelerators and memory solutions using FPGAs and custom ASICs. This includes close coupled accelerator architectures, innovative architectures/technologies for emerging workloads, edge/cloud systems, and infrastructure. He has more than 15 publications and 20 issued patents.

Amr El-Ashmawi, VP Vertical Markets, Groq.
Amr is the Vice President of Marketing, Verticals and Partnerships at Groq, an AI accelerator that provides software-driven solutions for real-time AI, ML, and HPC applications. Amr specializes in the financial services, cybersecurity, enterprise communications, and US government verticals. Amr previously worked in marketing leadership positions at Cypress Semiconductor Corporation (acquired by Infineon), Microsemi Corporation (acquired by Microchip), and Altera (acquired by Intel).

Mark Eslinger, Senior Principal Product Engineer, Digital Verification Technologies, Siemens.
Mark is a Senior Principal Product Engineer in the IC Verification Systems division of Siemens EDA where he specializes in assertion-based methods and formal verification. Mark has over 25 years of experience in design and verification, applications engineering, and technical marketing.

Jacob Farmer, Founder and Chief Evangelist, Starfish Storage.
Jacob is the founder and chief evangelist for Starfish Storage. He is a storage industry veteran with over 30 years' experience with backups, archives, large file systems, and research data management.

Patrick Flannery, Group Leader, Low Latency, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
With over 15 years in the financial technology space, Patrick has unparalleled experience in building advanced technology for highly scalable low-latency market data applications in equities and derivatives markets. Patrick was the Chief Executive Officer of MayStreet, a firm he co-founded in 2012. With the acquisition of MayStreet by LSEG, Patrick is now Group Leader- Low Latency, within the Enterprise Data Solutions group. Prior to founding MayStreet, Patrick was the Director of Engineering at NYC-based equity options market maker, Sumo Capital. Before that, he was a Senior Engineer at Volant Trading, a multi-asset proprietary trading firm.

Seth Friedman, CEO, Liquid-Markets-Solutions.
Seth has been an active leader at the forefront of electronic trading for over 20 years. Seth has deep sales-trading, technology and consulting experience and a history of technology vision, including invention of a multi-patented order processing technology field proven since 2010. In Morgan Stanley Japan Seth headed Program Trading before establishing the Electronic Trading Services business; later heading that business throughout Asia. At Nomura, Seth established and headed the Quantitative Prime Services business, played a key role in the post-acquisition integration of Lehman Brothers, and was responsible for Electronic Product Management. At Liquid-Markets-Solutions Seth is the CEO and is responsible for product vision.

Pierre Gardrat, CTO, NovaSparks.
Pierre joined NovaSparks in 2010 as Hardware VP Engineering. Prior to joining NovaSparks, Pierre worked in the FPGA development industry for seven years, starting his career in the French Department of Homeland Security and then serving as firmware developer and application engineer at EVE, a leader of FPGA-based emulation acquired in 2012 by Synopsys. Pierre graduated from Telecom Paristech (ENST Paris) and holds an MSc from University of Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris.

Francisco Girela, BizDev and Sales Eng Manager, Orolia.
Francisco holds a Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Granada. After some time in the private sector, Francisco joined the Timing Keepers group at the same university as a researcher. During his research, he specialized in ultra-accurate time transfer systems and he focused on the development of the White Rabbit technology. At the moment, he leads the expansion of Orolia in the North American market and in the finance sector. His latest work involves the deployment of very long distance WR links and the integration of the HATI core in third party FPGA based devices.

Lev Goronshtein, Advisory Systems Engineer, Nutanix.
Accomplished IT leader and technology strategist with proven success directing complex, enterprise-scale IT infrastructure and operations within corporate and data center environments; adept in short- and long-range planning, aligning technology infrastructure with business needs and objectives. Demonstrated expertise in client-facing consulting and service delivery, hands-on enterprise system engineering and administration, and legacy infrastructure migration and modernization. Talent for cross-functional team leadership, intra-organizational collaboration, and executive team advising.

Dr. Daryl Inniss, Director, OFS Fitel, LLC.
Daryl has been in fiber optics and telecommunications for over 30 years. He was formerly Practice Leader at market research firm Ovum and RHK where he covered advanced telecommunication technologies. Daryl co-authored Silicon Photonics (Morgan Kaufmann, 2016) and was a Technical Manager at JDSU and Lucent Technologies, formerly AT&T. Daryl holds a PhD in Chemistry from UCLA and an AB from Princeton University. He is from St. Thomas, the US Virgin Islands and has lived on the east and west coasts, the mid-west and is currently in Boulder, CO.

Bill Jenkins, Director Product Marketing for AI/Military/Financial, Achronix.
New to Achronix from Intel, but over 25 years experience in FPGAs and a variety of markets including Financial. Key leader for High Level Design Tools for FPGAs and AI solutions.

Joel Kaufman, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, WEKA.
For the last 25+ years Joel has worked in tech including several startups, then SGI, HP and then 20+ years with NetApp focused on performance, application integration, manageability, and virtualization/containerization of applications. For the last several years at WEKA, Joel has been focused on how they can integrate with customer environments to bring value into their data pipelines and processes.

Jack Kiernan, Senior Presales Engineer, KX.
Jack is based in New York and has spent more than six years at KX designing and developing systems for the world’s largest financial services organizations – purposefully built to gain deep real-time insight and powered by the unparalleled speed and efficiency of kdb+ database technology.

Matthew Klos, Senior Solutions Architect, IBM.
Matt is a Senior Solutions Architect at IBM with many years of experience designing customer storage environments specifically around parallel filesystems. Matt has years of experience benchmarking and deploying storage environments for a multitude of use cases including AI/Ml, analytics, and traditional HPC.

Stephen Kopec, North America, Data Center FAE Manager, AMD.
Steve has been with AMD (formerly Xilinx) for ten years as an FAE. He has been involved with FPGA design for the past 25 years. Aa graduate of NJIT with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering (1999) & Master of Science in Computer Engineering (2002), the first part of his career, his focus was on Aerospace & Defense. Over the past six years, he's been focused on Datacenter. Steve supports customers globally for Datacenter FPGA applications and manages the Datacenter FAEs in North America. His expertise is everything with FPGAs - firmware design, place/route, PCB design, etc.

Roman Kostiuk, Vice President, Market Data Technical Services, Societe Generale.
Roman has been active in the DMA\Market Data space for close to two decades. He began his career with Citibank managing trading floor Market Data Infrastructure and Data Centers. Later moving to Pain Weber/UBS, TIAA/CREF in the DMA space. Currently he manages the DMA infrastructure at Société Générale.

Peter Lankford, Founder and Executive Chairman, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter led the creation of STAC in 2006 to reduce the enormous time and effort the finance industry invests in evaluating high technology. As Executive Chairman, Peter focuses on key growth initiatives and ensures that STAC continues to strengthen the principles and practices that the community values. Peter has over 30 years of experience in technology and financial services, including SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters and management positions at Citibank, First Chicago, and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Master’s in International Relations, and Bachelor’s in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Darrin Machay, Principal Engineer, Arista Networks

Jonathan Malamed, Director, Unstructured Data, Pure Storage.
Over 25 years of sales, presales, services and account management experience, both from a business and a technical perspective. Background includes direct selling of solutions and services, extensive depth in storage, consulting and management. A dynamic leader with a success track focusing on customer problems, selling best practice solutions, improving team effectiveness, and helping customers to reduce costs, and enhancing overall operational efficiency. Recognized as supporting all aspects of technology and business needs for a wide range of clients.

Alket Memushaj, Principal Solutions Architect – Capital Markets, Amazon Web Services .
Alket is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, where he is responsible for helping customers in the capital markets sector build new solutions and modernize their existing applications through the adoption of AWS cloud services. Alket focuses on post-trade activities and currently leads the financial services solution architect community. Prior to AWS, Alket was the global engineering lead for private cloud at Morgan Stanley, where he designed and engineered multiple generations of the private cloud platform. Alket has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science.

Peter Nabicht, President, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter has spent nearly 20 years driving change at the intersection of technology and complex business problems. At STAC, Peter's mission is to leverage this experience to guide the continued rapid growth of the STAC community. His key roles prior to STAC include: CTO of Allston Trading, developing and supporting multi-asset, low latency trading systems; Co-founder of 12Sided Technology, which developed high-throughput network data capture and analytics; and Head of Electronic Markets Strategy and Development at Dealerweb. Peter has a BA in English and a MS in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago.

Rachel Oberman, AI Software Solutions Engineer, Intel.
Rachel is an AI Software Solutions Engineer who helps customers optimize their workflows with data analytics and artificial intelligence optimizations from Intel. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Data Science from the College of William & Mary with a background in geospatial analysis. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Computer Science with a focus in Machine Learning at Columbia University.

Sven Oehme, Chief Technical Officer, DDN.
Sven, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) drives innovation across current and future products at DDN. Before joining DDN, he had a 25-year career at IBM with his last position being Senior Technical Staff Member and Chief Research Strategist for Elastic Storage. He led the team driving performance improvements on IBM’s Spectrum Scale product (aka General Parallel File System or GPFS), a high-performance clustered file system used in large commercial computers and supercomputers. He was responsible for metadata, streaming I/O, and specific analytics optimizations. Sven is a recognized expert on advanced file systems and holds multiple patents on the subject.

Andrey Rybka, Head of CTO Compute and Cloud Architecture, Bloomberg.
Andrey Rybka is the Head of Compute & Cloud Architecture in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg LP. At Bloomberg, he guides corporate strategy around Compute Fabric and Cloud, IaaS, PaaS, Middleware, Frameworks and Applications. Before joining Bloomberg in 2014, he worked at a number of financial technology organizations and various startups. He holds a master’s degree in software engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a doctorate degree in applied computing from Pace University, and a Bachelor of Science in computer information systems from Post University.

Hamid Salehi, Director of Product Management, FinTech & Blockchain, AMD.
Hamid leads the product marketing team for Fintech & Blockchain at Adaptable and Embedded Compute Group (AECG) at AMD. In his role, Hamid oversees marketing, product development and strategy. Prior to his current role, Hamid founded a startup in the IOT space, and worked at Marvell Semiconductor, Broadcom, T-Mobile, and Radio Frequency Systems (Alcatel-Lucent) in various roles, including product management, business development, analytics, and finance. Hamid received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of waterloo and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Vahan Sardaryan, Co-Founder and CEO, LDA Technologies.
Vahan is a Co-Founder and the CEO at LDA Technologies, a known provider of leading high-performance FPGA-based networking products. Vahan’s experience in software design goes back 20 years and encompasses various fields such as high-performance networking, information security, realtime systems and such. He has been involved in electronic trading industry for over 12 years, 8 years of which was dedicated to HFT companies’ needs. Vahan holds a PhD degree equivalent in Applied Mathematics and is an avid chess player.

Harley Semple, Director Data Solutions,Options Technology.
Harley began her career at CME Group’s Belfast hub working in analytics before moving to Options in 2019 where she has since worked with global financial clients in Singapore, Dublin, London, and New York. As an integral member of the Options M&A team throughout several acquisitions Harley spearheaded the market data synergies integration globally. As Director of Data Solutions Harley has made her career from pushing the boundaries to optimize and innovate the Options product offering and processes in a quest ensure their clients’ stay ahead of the curve with efficient and cutting-edge solutions.

Adam Sherer, Verification Technology Executive, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Adam drives verification software and hardware sales in Eastern North America with 31 years of experience in verification and software engineering. He is also secretary of the Accellera IP Security Assurance standard working group and often presents on security verification. Adam received his MS EE from the University of Rochester, with research published in the IEEE Transactions on CAD. His BS EE and BA CS were received from SUNY Buffalo. He also holds a 2017 patent in verification technology.

Joseph Steiner, Global CTO of Financial Services, UDS Division, Dell Technologies.
Joe joined UDS in 2010 after 20 years in the Financial Services industry (FSI). Joe held leadership positions at Bank of America, NationsBank and G.E. Capital. Since 2010 his focus has been to drive continued adoption of PowerScale, Isilon and ECS as the best scale-out file and object platforms to solve enterprise challenges facing Dell’s largest customers. Joe is working with Dell’s top global customers to help define their next generation business & technology transformations – covering automation, data protection, governance, software-defined file and object storage, converged infrastructure and empowering data driven business value!

Todd Strader, FPGA Engineer, Hudson River Trading.
Todd has been building custom hardware for trading applications for over 15 years. Prior to that Todd designed network ASICs for supercomputers at IBM. He is a longtime contributor to the Verilator project and an ardent advocate of automating just about everything. At HRT, Todd works on low latency devices, tries to make the tool stack better and leads the verification team.

Pawel Szopinski, VP & Head of Transformation, Specialized Infrastructure, Barclays.
Pawel is a senior technology management professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience including Barclays Investment Bank, Sequoia Capital and Sequoia Capital Fund Management with responsibility for development and management of high performance trading infrastructure, IT operations and security. Pawel also held a number of senior engineering roles, working for large managed IT infrastructure providers. He holds an MBA in Technology Management from OUBS with hands-on experience and qualifications covering the entire IT stack, specialising in the financial technology supporting trading teams across all asset classes from trade floor to HFT strategies, algorithmic trading and machine learning as well as strategic, project and financial planning, regulatory and business compliance.

David Taylor, Co-president & CTO, Exegy.
David oversees product strategy, architecture, research and development, and also leads the pre-sales engineering, product management and marketing efforts at Exegy. He is an inventor on 37 United States and 29 international patents and patents-pending. Prior to joining Exegy, David served on the faculty and researched high-performance computer networks at the Applied Research Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.